The Kick & Push Festival – Flashing Lights
I felt like I was witnessing a live version of a Black Mirror episode when sitting down to watch Flashing Lights in the Regina Rosen Auditorium in The Grand Theatre. This show is a co-production of Ahuri Theatre & Bad New Days Theatre Company. Bad New Days is a company that concerns itself with creating and performing theatre of gesture that is contemporary and poetic. Let me break that down for you:
Contemporary = the company is engaged in the times in which we live by always remaining slightly outside of them. This distance allows the artists to accurately speak on the light and darkness of our times.
Poetic = not our understanding of poetry, but the original ancient Greek understanding of the word, which is an action that transforms the world. The company utilizes poeisis (the Greek verb) to initiate a new way of looking and thinking about the world in which we live.
Gesture = rooted within Bertolt Brecht’s gestus – a fundamental physical attitude towards life – the company bases its work on the human body and its potential for expression through movement and rhythm.
This production’s contemporary connection had to do with everything social media – why it may be so popular, how it affects the human psyche and interactions with others, and how far people will go with it to achieve their 15 minutes of fame. At the root of this exploration seemed to lie one question: what can the construction and obsession over a digital identity do to one’s real-life identity? From this, the team at Bad New Days created a compelling, increasingly dystopian narrative that shines a bright, harsh light on our desperate need for attention in a content-saturated digital world.
The narrative is set up as follows: a daughter innocently films a short video of her father eating cereal before their respective departures to work and school. Then, the video is mysteriously uploaded to the Internet and instantly becomes an overnight sensation in the form of a beloved meme. Meanwhile, the mother works at OMNI, a tech company that wants to revolutionize the way in which people interact with their tech by making it as intimate and personalized to them as possible. At the beginning of the play, she pitches her product to a group of Chinese investors in Shanghai and is approved. You’ll just have to go see the show to find out how these events play out, and how they eventually connect to one another.
In regards to form: through a thoughtful and tasteful hybrid of theatrical devices and technology, the team of artists and creators managed to pull off what I was beginning to think was impossible – a show heavily infused with technology that focuses on the story as opposed to the technology. Even if you get lost in the overwhelming breadth of technology present, the story will helps ground audiences so they understand what they’re witnessing onstage, most of the time.
The most obvious feature of this tech was the scrim that was put up downstage, in front of the entire playing space. At first, the scrim is distracting because the audience cannot get the pure and unfiltered experience of the actor body so many of us crave as audiences of the theatre. As the show proceeds, however, I realized how necessary the scrim was in achieving a specific and important desired effect: enlarging and publicizing the most intimate features of a person’s appearance and life. Appropriately, the actors would be carrying around a phone or a tablet onstage that would film and livestream whatever the subject happened to be on the scrim so audiences could be exposed to every detail of the subject. Using screens in this fashion helps to highlight the work’s contemporary relevance to audiences. Nowadays, we can create and have experiences both in real life and in our digital lives through screens. Therefore, this fusion of live and mediated forms enhances and diversifies our conceptual understanding of the piece.
Beyond technology, and in congruence with the company’s emphasis on gesture, the performers also used their bodies to emphasize perhaps the most defining feature between a real-life identity and a digital identity – the human body itself. Through various sequences including an aging mother inspecting every wrinkle and blemish on her face to a movement sequence with animal masks exploring a human being’s rootedness in nature, these sequences urge audiences to contemplate their digital presences and whether or not they are worth the neglect of their physical body (or other physical bodies – i.e. friends and family) that seems to go with enhancing their digital presence.
Nominated for 8 Dora Awards, and winner of the Dora Award for Lighting Design, Flashing Lights is a high-tech theatrical spectacle that focuses on the true meaning of a spectacle, which the creators define as a social gathering around an image. You won’t want to miss it – I promise.
The show is playing as part of The Kick & Push Festival until August 11. Click here for information on show times and ticketing.